Content Marketing – What I Learned in 2016

Lately, the nay-sayers have been getting to me. Do this, stop doin this. This works, this does not work. Frankly, if you believed everything out there, you would sit back and say nothing works so I am not going to do anything.

Many people believe content marketing is dead. Time to move on. People don’t read your articles anymore.

I want to set the record straight. For those people who don’t listen to the nay-sayers and produced content on a regular basis for the past 5-7 years, you are leading the pack and you have a strong basis to build on. This year I had the great idea to start another site, leadmanageexcute.com. After 71 posts, I decided to come back to this site. I would post 1-2 articles a week and the most traffic I would receive is maybe 10-13 visits a day. Meanwhile, my former blog site, marketingdirectorblog.com, continued to receive 30-50 visits a day and I only posted 3 additional articles in 2016.. With over 800+ articles, this site had the juice and volume that the other site could not achieve.

My takeaways from this exercise.

Content can still resonate well past the day it is published.

Content marketing takes time. If you want to accelerate the time, post more content, not less. I used to create articles every weekday on the marketingdirectorblog.com site. People thought I was nuts, but in the end it was all about creating content and starting conversations.

Yes, social media helps distribute my content. For me, Twitter is still my platform of choice. Many people have left Twitter for snapchat or Facebook. I feel if Twitter has worked for you in the past, why leave it. In fact, I see a whole new audience these days on Twitter. I think people are coming back to Twitter and these are the people who did not get on Twitter right away.

Don’t leave your website for some other platform or new domain. Domain strength still counts.

If you have not posted for awhile, consider going back and revisiting your content. It’s not too late.

It is very hard for a new website to gain traction and grow organically. Don’t believe the hype that if you create quality content, you will receive more visits. People need to be able to find you. The amount of information produced each day is astronomical. People are going to have to find ways to cut through the noise. Herein lies the really hard work.

Finally, I will be coming back to this site for future articles. I don’t have 5-8 years to grow a new site and frankly I am not sure who does. I am just glad I started this site a few years ago and I did not decide to retire it. If you are thinking about transitioning a current site to a new domain site, think again the return may be hard to achieve.